Excerpt:
I recently read a book that deserves the widest possible readership. The book is "The Trouble with Textbooks - Distorting History and Religion" by Gary A. Tobin and Dennis R. Ybarra. I have never met or talked with either of these gentlemen, but I can't say enough good things about this book. For all who believe that there is a fairly objective rendition of history that we are obliged to teach our children, this book reveals how shockingly far from that objective American education-and particularly school textbooks-have fallen.
In their conclusion, the authors quote the great historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis' observation concerning the willful bending of history: "We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was."
I discuss some of the findings of Mr. Tobin's and Mr. Ybarra's study in my latest book ("American Grit - What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century," which will be released in January). "The Trouble with Textbooks" identifies a system of self-censorship and cultural equivalence that celebrates everybody and omits many unpleasant historic facts.